STMicroelectronics Vice President talks about future general-purpose MCU planning

Recently, Ricardo De-Sa-Earp, Vice President of STMicroelectronics' Microcontroller and Digital IC (MDG) Product Division and General Manager of the Microcontroller Business Unit, took the opportunity of the STM32 Summit to introduce the future plans and development prospects of STM32 to the Chinese market.

Ricardo De-Sa-Earp, Vice President of Microcontroller and Digital ICs (MDG) Division and General Manager of Microcontroller Business Unit, STMicroelectronics

Ricardo said that the strategy of ST's microcontroller division can be simply described in two words: innovation. From 8-bit MCU to 32-bit different combinations, MCUs with different characteristics to MPUs, ST continues to innovate and add many differentiated options to MCUs. At the same time, in order to expand the MCU ecosystem, ST has successively acquired a number of software development companies to provide customers with a better one-stop experience.

"These strategies have been successfully implemented and recognized by customers. We first launched STM32 in 2007, ranking 11th in the market. By 2015, the market ranking jumped to third, and last year it reached second place. At the same time, our general MCU market in China ranks first." In

2018, STMicroelectronics shipped more than 1.2 billion MCUs, with an annual compound growth rate of more than 30%. This is bound to be a test for the supply chain. For this reason, STMicroelectronics has provided a ten-year supply commitment and dual-wafer fab production to ensure safe and stable production capacity. To this day, all STM32 13 series products are still in mass production, including 180nm process products 10 years ago.

Flexible factory layout for STMicroelectronics MCU product line

Connectivity, artificial intelligence and security

Ricardo said that security, artificial intelligence and connectivity are the three major development paths of STM32 in the future, and STM32MP1 represents another high-performance route.

Full connectivity solution

Ricardo defines the STM32 connectivity solution as a full solution, which can be viewed from multiple angles. First of all, in terms of product form, ST and its partners have developed a variety of styles such as modules, SiP and SoC to meet different market needs. In terms of supported standards, it includes low-power and long-distance Lora, Sigfox, LTE, NB-IoT and other standards, as well as medium and short-distance products such as BLE, WiFi, and Bluetooth. There are products that meet both industrial industry standards and personal electronic standards.

All In Artificial Intelligence

Ricardo said that STM32 expands computing power by constantly introducing new elements. For example, 3D graphics accelerators and artificial intelligence elements, as well as the latest memory interfaces, STM32MP1 have achieved a great expansion of computing power. "So far, we have implemented 32-bit Linux in Cortex-A and real-time operating systems in the Cortex-M series." Ricardo said.

In the field of artificial intelligence, in addition to the MP1 TFLOPS processing performance, STMicroelectronics has also developed artificial intelligence for MCUs with lower processing performance. Although the processing power is several hundred GFLOPS, it can achieve functions such as step recognition and scene recognition. "We are now focusing on edge artificial intelligence. We firmly believe that smart connected terminals must have artificial intelligence capabilities and ultra-low power consumption, so as to ensure the most efficient data transmission on the node."

However, for embedded terminals, neural networks are not easy to import into MCUs due to problems such as computing power and operating system. To this end, ST has developed a functional software package Cube.AI, which uses an artificial intelligence framework to map neural networks to STM32, which is relatively convenient and allows more developers to deploy edge artificial intelligence with ease.

Currently, the software package already supports audio and motion analysis, character recognition and image classification, as well as more follow-up development functions. At the same time, ST has also launched a partner AI special program that can provide neural network engineering services to ensure a better user experience.

Security is fundamental.

Ricardo emphasized that all microcontrollers currently have built-in and inherited security technologies, such as security authentication solutions, secure memory, code and data isolation, etc. In

2018, ST also released the Cortex-M33 processor STM32L5 with integrated Arm TrustZone hardware security technology, which has flexible software isolation, secure boot, key storage and hardware encryption accelerator functions. In addition, ST also has a dedicated security MCU business unit.

Software is indispensable.

Ricardo finally introduced the rich and colorful prototyping, development tools and software components of STM32. For example, in 2018, it announced the acquisition of Draupner Graphics, the developer and supplier of TouchGFX software, to provide customers with more flexible embedded solutions. "Now we have successfully introduced factors such as graphical interfaces and cloud connections to microcontrollers, giving embedded systems more flexible functions." Ricardo said.

According to Ricardo, the total number of STM32 customers has reached more than 60,000. Such a large customer base must be dealt with by a complete ecosystem. This is the biggest innovation of STM32 - building a huge, complex and clearly divided ecosystem in the MCU and embedded fields.